Ithaca Bakery

Ithaca Bakery only makes donuts on the weekend, and they are only available in these pre-packaged 6-packs. So if you want a donut, you need to find some donut friends!! Or eat 6 donuts. Which we obviously condone. Although you will need to balance that out with some savory snacks. That’s experience talking.

The Tasting

We start with Ithaca Bakery’s cake donuts. The chocolate-frosted variety is tender, moist, and fluffy, and the frosting is tender too. The cake has some flavor, with a hint of vanilla, and we are starting off strong. There’s a boatload of sprinkles, which overpower the flavor of the frosting, but they get fall-colored happy-points (not a thing) and add a nice crunch.

The cinnamon-sugar donut has the same cake inside, but it’s a bit more crumbly and dry, unfortunately. (Don’t be fooled by Laurel’s smile — that’s straight disappointment.) Was it baked earlier and already got a little stale? We’re not sure.

We move on to the chocolate cake varieties and find them less flavorful, as we have found in all chocolate cake donuts so far in Ithaca. What’s the point of these chocolate donuts, if they aren’t going to taste chocolatey?

In the toasted-coconut donut, the coconut flavor immediately overpowers the taste of the cake, which isn’t exactly a feat. The glaze that holds the coconut on tastes like pure powdered sugar, and yikes — it’s sweet.

We move on to Ithaca Bakery’s yeast donuts, which are very light and fluffy. A trepidatious woo hoo? Duc says they are “moist enough,” which Laurel interprets as high praise coming from Duc, but he also thinks the glaze is too sticky. There isn’t too much flavor, other than a soft, slight yeastiness.

On to the boston creme! We are powering through these. The donut is fairly photogenic, but we aren’t huge fans. To be fair, neither of us are very big on this type of donut, from anywhere. It’s very light, and the dough is airy and fairly tasteless. The cream is extremely gelatinous, and its flavor doesn’t really even start to make up for its strange texture.

Ithaca Bakery – Texture Scores:

Duc: The yeast donuts had decent moisture, lightness, and fluffiness. Not remarkable, but OK. The cake varieties ran the line from pretty good to disappointing, which reverted us back to just average.Score: 3/5

Laurel: The first cake donut we tried was the most tender and moist, and I felt like the texture kept getting worse from there on out, which was really disappointing. Ithaca Bakery is my friend, but these donuts didn’t act like it.Score: 3/5

Ithaca Bakery – Flavor Scores:

Duc: The yeast donuts had a slight yeastiness in flavor, which I enjoyed, and avoided that unpleasant aftertaste that we’ve noticed in some donuts. The biggest disappointment was the chocolate cake donut, which somehow lacked chocolatiness.Score: 3.5/5

Laurel: There wasn’t anything special about any of the flavors that happened here, but nothing was specially bad either. Non-memorable.Score: 3/5

Overall Thoughts

Man, we’re getting critical! This isn’t to say that we were particularly harsh on these donuts or any others, but once you’ve eaten a certain number of donuts… your desire for great ones just becomes that much higher.

As it turns out, good donuts are something that are really difficult to achieve. But as we’ve seen in the ones we’ve really liked, when they’re good, they’re damn good.